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aletheist

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I honestly thought that we were addressing the question, "What caused the cushion to be indented in the first place?" I am not seeing how this other q...
September 23, 2019 at 23:07
I agree that the argument presented in the OP establishes the need for an uncaused (substance) cause. However, the very next paragraph makes the state...
September 23, 2019 at 22:59
Because I would (understandably) assume that the cushion was previously undeformed, until the ball caused the indentation. Upon being informed that th...
September 23, 2019 at 22:55
Here is what you said that started us down this road. What is required to avoid an infinite regress is an event that is caused by a substance, rather ...
September 23, 2019 at 22:50
What are you talking about? I not only follow the argument, I agree with it. Indeed, "there must also be 'substance causation,'" but that is exactly t...
September 23, 2019 at 22:44
Right, the result of a cause is just what an event is. An "uncaused event" is a self-contradiction. Lots of true propositions, especially in philosoph...
September 23, 2019 at 22:34
That is an unwarranted assumption that is not even part of the argument as presented in the OP. In fact, it directly contradicts its very first premis...
September 23, 2019 at 22:25
Right, I was instead addressing the problem named in the thread title. And the original was about "the pious" and "the gods," so the common version th...
September 23, 2019 at 22:19
I am not addressing your argument at all, just describing the actual Euthyphro dilemma as it is commonly set forth by contemporary philosophers. It is...
September 23, 2019 at 22:08
Here is the actual exchange. I was correcting the mistake in the OP. You and I are in agreement here--it is false that every event is caused by anothe...
September 23, 2019 at 22:03
The Euthyphro is usually posed as a question: Is something good because God wills it, or does God will it because it is good? The first option makes g...
September 23, 2019 at 21:45
More accurately, every series of events has a first uncaused cause. Which is exactly what I said; please read more carefully. already addressed that--...
September 23, 2019 at 21:31
No, this would imply that every event is caused by another event, which is not what the first premiss asserts. The conclusion is that there must be a ...
September 23, 2019 at 21:07
Transliterated from the actual Greek work ???????. Thanks; but then, the denial that there is such a thing as (absolute) truth is self-refuting.
September 23, 2019 at 19:43
Thanks for asking. The Greek word for "truth" is transliterated aletheia, so I call myself "aletheist" because I believe that there is such a thing as...
September 23, 2019 at 17:35
No, it is called a theorem because Gödel provided a proof; otherwise, it would be called a hypothesis or conjecture. Fermat's conjecture came to be kn...
September 23, 2019 at 17:24
Proof does not establish truth, it establishes justification. However, since mathematics is the science of drawing necessary conclusions about hypothe...
September 23, 2019 at 13:35
That would be Gödel's proof of his incompleteness theorem, and the correct term is not "unprovable" but undecidable. In this context, I am not so much...
September 23, 2019 at 13:08
No, the two Wikipedia quotes are not contradictory. The second one only affirms that a proof is sufficient for the truth of a proposition; it does not...
September 23, 2019 at 03:01
I mean exactly what I said, quoting the Stanford article--Gödel's incompleteness theorem only applies to formal systems "within which a certain amount...
September 23, 2019 at 02:53
This sounds like an endorsement of constructivist logic, such as intuitionistic logic, which requires a positive proof in order to affirm any proposit...
September 22, 2019 at 18:25
As already noted, it depends on which system of logic you have in mind, since Gödel's incompleteness theorem only applies to formal systems "within wh...
September 22, 2019 at 18:00
Suit yourself, but I will go with the mathematicians on this. Cheers.
September 22, 2019 at 01:13
Density is irrelevant to multitude, and in any case the whole numbers are of the same multitude as the odd numbers. For any collection A that has n su...
September 21, 2019 at 23:18
Because the real numbers correspond to all the possible combinations of rational numbers, and therefore are necessarily of greater multitude than the ...
September 21, 2019 at 03:47
Mathematicians are well aware of it, and it is not a problem at all. The real numbers are of greater multitude than the rational numbers, but the even...
September 21, 2019 at 02:07
It depends on what you mean by "argument forms." As just pointed out, what you seem to be seeking is an axiomatization of classical logic, which typic...
September 21, 2019 at 01:57
Again, all the different combinations of subjects of any collection--including any infinite collection--is of greater multitude than the collection it...
September 21, 2019 at 01:31
No, the collection of all combinations of the subjects of a collection--even an infinite collection--is always of greater multitude than that collecti...
September 21, 2019 at 00:35
The mistake in the OP, going all the way back to Zeno, is thinking that discrete dimensionless positions in space and discrete durationless instants i...
September 20, 2019 at 22:12
As I see it, Potter and Holmes have not actually influenced anyone as real agents; those effects are more properly attributed to Rowling and Doyle, al...
January 18, 2019 at 15:20
It is normally parsed that way in formal logic, both modern and Aristotelian, which is the universe of discourse for this thread. In fact, the OP expl...
January 17, 2019 at 18:43
What J. K. Rowling and Arthur Conan Doyle have written about Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes, respectively, is real--their books (and all derivative ...
January 17, 2019 at 17:41
In both modern and Aristotelian logic, every particular proposition (such as "Some B is C") is about existence in the universe of discourse. In Aristo...
January 16, 2019 at 20:09
Right; and in modern deductive logic, the conclusion "Some B is C" does not follow from the premises "All A is B" and "All A is C," since a universal ...
January 16, 2019 at 19:30
Conflating reality and existence, as usual. Cheers.
January 16, 2019 at 16:54
Infinite divisibility is an insufficient criterion for continuity. After all, the rational numbers are infinitely divisible--thus serving as the basis...
January 15, 2019 at 23:11
We have been over all of this before. Infinite divisibility is a red herring. Continuous motion through space-time is the fundamental reality. An inte...
January 15, 2019 at 14:54
Huh? The assumption of discreteness is what creates problems like Zeno's paradoxes. As I have said before, recognizing that continuous motion through ...
January 15, 2019 at 03:03
But deductive validity requires that the form must guarantee deriving only true conclusions from true premises. Right, but Aristotle stipulated that a...
January 15, 2019 at 01:27
I see it the other way around--measurement is arbitrary; we impose it by comparing something to a discrete unit, but the underlying reality itself is ...
January 14, 2019 at 18:19
Whether we are imagining them or not, the issue is whether there are any As at all. The proposition "All A is B," or equivalently "For all x, if x is ...
January 14, 2019 at 15:58
It seems quite evident to me that there must be a real context within which discrete things exist and react. For example, we say that they have extens...
January 14, 2019 at 15:41
No particular book recommendation, sorry. Needless to say, there is a lot of helpful material online.
January 14, 2019 at 03:09
The law of identity is "All A is A." We cannot derive "Some A is A" from that, either. Again, in modern deductive logic it is always a fallacy to deri...
January 14, 2019 at 03:01
Correct--we can derive "It is not the case that some A is not B" from "All A is B." However, we still cannot derive "Some A is B" from either of these...
January 14, 2019 at 02:43
Of course it is a concept, but the issue is whether it is "purely conceptual," as you claim. Why did it have to evolve? Because our understanding chan...
January 14, 2019 at 02:35
I still do not understand the question. We are discussing formal logic, what true conclusions we can--or rather, cannot--derive from that proposition,...
January 14, 2019 at 02:06
Sorry, I do not understand this question.
January 14, 2019 at 01:41
No, a universal proposition does not establish the universe of discourse all by itself. I provided a link, so if you want to disagree with modern cate...
January 14, 2019 at 01:31